Hairy time for Hong Kong

Huw Richards reports on The THES's conference on the territory's future.

In the absence of American participants nobody used the phrase "800 pound gorilla", but the sense of a brooding offstage presence was there all the same.

The title of Britain and Hong Kong: the relationship beyond 1997, organised by Newcastle University's Centre for East Asian Studies and sponsored by The THES, indicated a concentration on the affairs of the territory. But inevitably the occasion focused on the future of China.

There was much to discuss about Hong Kong. Sir David Ford, a Hong Kong civil servant since 1967, chief secretary for seven years up to 1993 and now London Commissioner for the colony, arrived clutching faxes detailing the results of the weekend's municipal elections in which the liberal Democrat party won heavily over pro-Beijing and establishment groups.

One member of the audience wanted to know whether Hong Kong governor Chris Patten's belated attempts at democratic reform had been constructive or destructive. Jurgen Domes, professor of political science at the Saar University and one of Germany's leading sinologist, replied that "if you think economic profit is more important than human rights it was destructive. If you think human rights are more important than economic profit, it was constructive."

Patten may well be unique among Hong Kong's rulers - past or future - in opting for human rights. What was absent from this exchange was any sense that what he is doing will make any real difference when the Chinese take charge on July 1 1997.

Nobody was suggesting that the second half of 1997 will find Red Guards crewing the Star Ferry, commissars in the newsroom at The South China Morning Post and Li Peng taking personal charge in Government House. Sir David said: "There will be no cadres coming down from Beijing to take over. The border will still be there and the Hong Kong dollar will be retained. The reality is that very little will change."

Sean Breslin, acting director of the Newcastle Centre only a decade after being among the first of its undergraduates to spend a year in Beijing, noted that "in economic terms Hong Kong is already part of South China. There is a growing demand for Hong Kong dollars in Kuantang, and around half of the workforce there is employed by Hong Kong capital. There are times when it is tempting to ask who is taking over whom in 1997."

Hong Kong's future is already irrevocably bound up with China. Optimism or pessimism about the territory's future is almost entirely contingent upon expectations about the mainland.

Much has been made of Chinese gestures like the "countdown clock" in Tiananmen Square ticking off the seconds until the territory is returned. Sir David, who arrived in Hong Kong when it was apparently in danger of being swamped by the backwash of the Cultural Revolution, argued that a tendency to bloodcurdling rhetoric conceals more than it illuminates. "Look at what they do, not what they say. Whatever the rhetoric, their actions are invariably pragmatic."

Similarly guarded optimism was on offer from Henry Tang Ying-Yan, a man with feet in a number of camps through his roles as managing director of a substantial textiles company, appointed member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council and adviser to the Chinese Government. "In Hong Kong we have learnt to take what China says with a pinch of salt. And while we joke about China, it is true that it has come an enormous way since 1949. China has never had it so good materially." Yet to run for election - though widely expected to do so when the Legislative Council is elected this autumn - the hugely personable Tang is not short on political skills. He disarmed any possible negative reaction to his spectacularly evasive response to a question about press freedom in 1997 with a smile that reached its broadest when he pointed out that freedom of speech is guaranteed in the Chinese constitution.

Both he and Sir Donald implicitly assumed some degree of continuity and control in China. But political and economic transition on the scale expected in China is not necessarily conducive to either. Breslin noted the analogy used by Glasgow Russologist Stephen White: "The Russian reformers started a snowball downhill, tried to stop it halfway and were run over by it."

Domes proffered a series of potential scenarios testing the now unstoppable impetus of economic reform against the repressive instincts of at least some of the likely successors to Deng Hsiao-Ping, China's expiring leader. "Communist rule seems to be doomed to collapse in the long range. The crucial questions are how this collapse might happen and how much time the agony of communism is going to take." One possible outcome is that the division between the booming coastal regions of China and other regions could become full-scale disintegration. Breslin's paper, a trenchantly sceptical analysis of Chinese economic prospects, pointed to the extent to which economic decision-making had already drained away from Beijing towards the provinces - not so much a liberalisation as a decentralisation as provincial governments continued to display heavily interventionist instincts. Domes said: "One can well imagine, within a decade or two, the evolution of an almost or fully independent region consisting of Kuangtang, possibly Kuangsi, Hong Kong and Macao which cooperates closely with another such region consisting of Taiwan, Fukien and Chekiang."

This outcome would offer Hong Kong relatively good prospects, as would the victory of reformers - either gradually and peacefully or in the immediate aftermath of the death of Deng. "There would be some bloodshed," said Domes, "but by and large the process of transition from communism to market-oriented pluralism would be peaceful."

But other outcomes offered China, and by implication Hong Kong, a much unhappier near future. One posited a victory for reformists followed by an orthodox backlash and a descent into civil war. Another suggested that a continuation of repression under orthodox leadership would eventually create intolerable tensions between rulers and ruled: "Social tensions would eventually explode in consecutive manifestations of ever more violent dissent. A number of such manifestations could probably be suppressed. But inevitably China would disintegrate, stumble into chaos and inescapably move toward a large-scale, extremely violent confrontation. This would lead to the drowning of Communist rule in an ocean of blood."

Domes said it was difficult to assign orders of probability to his scenarios, but that the relatively peaceful collapse of Communism was realistic only in the next three or four years, while the continued repression leading to eventual disaster projection "gains higher probability if more time passes without major new difficulties in the economy and new conflicts within the Chinese Communist Party leadership".

Confessing that "hope is neither a tool nor a method of social sciences", he reached a gloomy conclusion. "These projections at the moment seem to have a higher probability than the more optimistic ones."

As one contributor noted, Hong Kong faces only one certainty - that it is set, in the terms of the oft-quoted Chinese curse, for "interesting times".